News is breaking today that Youtube will soon be launching a new movie rental service with late releases from major studios including WB, Sony and Universal. A number of names have been rumored to have signed up for the new service, including independent studios like Lionsgate.

To be accurate, Youtube has had full length movies for some time now. You can even rent some titles. But the selection would best be described as anemic. The SF section, for example, has quite a few older movies but little published in the last 10 years. Youtube didn’t have the really popular movies. For that you had to go to iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Unbox.

I’m not too excited about this, myself. The Youtube video player has a poor design. It’s fine for short clips, but when you try to watch a full length movie you’ll notice its shortcomings.